As the three of them moved out into the hall and down to the elevator, Travis put his arm around Nicole and smiled at her. Then, as he pushed the button for the elevator, he turned to Clayne. “Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t know. Something still doesn’t add up.”
“Do you really think the fox can outsmart this hound?”
Clayne considered that, then shook his head. “No. We’ve got him covered. There’s no way he can pull it off.”
“The real problem,” Nicole said, “is that the fox isn’t aware of just how smart the old hound on his tail really is.”
The elevator door opened and Travis and Nicole stepped in. For a moment Clayne stood and looked at Nicole without really seeing her. Then he too lumbered in, and the elevator dropped slightly with the additional weight. As the door closed, he turned and stared at the door.
“I think you’ve just hit on it, Nicole.”
“What?”
“That’s what’s troubling me. I think the fox knows exactly how smart we are, and it doesn’t seem to bother him at all. He’s too shrewd not to know we suspect him, but it doesn’t stop him. That’s the real question. Why doesn’t it?”
Chapter 15
“Let’s stop here,” Cliff said, slowing their leisurely pace along the pebbled path through the park and pointing to a bench. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, with the last of twilight lingering far past its expected stay.
As they sat down, Eric picked up a small pebble from the path and flipped it into the water.
“Okay,” Cliff said, “let’s hear it. And I’m warning you, I’ll be playing the part of a very skeptical critic. We’re not the first ones to ever try beating this, you know. I’ve now documented thirteen cases—and there are probably many more—where people have tried to break free of the Major’s little Utopia. Four are burned-out hulks—living bodies with no minds—and the rest are dead.”
“I know,” Eric said, “but I’ve got it all worked out.” Then he shook his head ruefully. “Except for one question.”
“All right, let’s hear your solution first, then the question.”
Eric took a deep breath, determined not to let his excitement show through. “We have two problems, as I see it. First, we have to get the implantation out, and second, we have to get the wrist computer off. Right?”
“Three problems,” Cliff corrected. “Have you forgotten that the wrist computer and the implantation chip are electronically interdependent? If you could break the band of the wrist computer—which you cannot do, because any pull automatically triggers the Punishment Mode. But if you could—”
“I can.”
“How?”
“I’m not going to break it. I’m going to cut it.”
Cliffs head jerked up, and he stared at Eric. “It can’t be done. As I told you before, the band is made of specially hardened steel. You’d need a saw with a very hard blade—which would probably be very hard on your arm—or special cutters. And we’ve already checked those. All are carefully controlled. You need a special permit to even touch one. With the Major monitoring your every movement, you won’t get within a mile of one.”
“I’ll get it off,” Eric said. “I’ll tell you how in a minute. So go on with my third problem.”
“We went through all this before. The wrist computer, if cut, triggers the implantation. The implantation, if removed, triggers the Punishment Mode in the wrist computer. Either or both are fatal.” He sighed. “Eric, the third problem is the problem. The other two are irrelevant until you solve it. Every one of the nine who were killed was killed in one of those two ways. No, you’ve got to give the Major and Dr. Gould credit. They have devised a very effective, interlocking system.”
“True, and that’s what’s been absolutely stumping me. But I’ve worked it out.”
“How?”
“Remove both of them at precisely the same instant.”
Cliff stared at him, disbelieving.
“If you have heavy-duty bolt cutters, you can do it. Have the incision in the neck already made, and don’t even touch the chip until the cutters are in place. Then simply yank the implantation out at the exact moment you cut the other, and all you have is a very clever interlocking system sizzling in thin air. Right?”
Cliff shook his head slowly. “Your timing would have to be absolutely precise. A second or two off and…It’s very dangerous.”
“Dangerous yes, but impossible? No!”
Cliffs eyes were narrowed in deep concentration, and for a moment he started to nod, then suddenly he shook his head. “It’s a brilliant plan, except for one tiny item.”
“What?”
“Who’s going to perform these two simultaneous maneuvers with such perfect timing?”
Eric smiled, fully enjoying the fact that he had already anticipated this question. “If you’ll teach me a few fundamentals of minor surgery, I’ll take yours out, you take mine. Fair enough?”
Cliff sighed, the disappointment drawing the corners of his mouth down sharply. “And have you forgotten that we are implanted? Illegal removal of an implantation is a capital offense. As much as I hate this thing—” he touched the back of his neck in disgust, “how steady do you think my hands will be with the chip sending jolts of electricity into my brain every time I think about what we’re doing?”
He stood up, angry that he had let his hopes rise. “Steady hands! I’ll be lucky to stay on my feet. Sorry, Eric, but I’ve never operated from a prone position before.”
“Okay. Now you’ve come to my question.”
“Great!” Cliff grunted irritably, “and since the whole plan depends on that one question, why don’t we just wait until then to work it out.”
“I know, I know. But I know there’s a solution. I’m on the verge of it, but I need your help to break through.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Let me read something to you. This is from a book on positive thinking.”
“Come on, Eric! Face reality. We need more than positive thinking to come out of this.”
“Will you just listen?” Eric said patiently, smoothing the paper out across his knee.
Cliff sat back down on the bench wearily. “Why not?”
Eric took a breath and plunged in. “‘Man’s brain and nervous system is a remarkably engineered, interwoven system. Man is the only known creature with an imagination. A person’s imagination has a very direct and visible effect on his nervous system. Outside reality is not nearly as important in determining man’s reaction to things as what he thinks about that reality. A human being acts not so much according to what reality is as he does on the basis of how he perceives that reality. Or, to put it another way, his body reacts according to what he believes reality is.’”
Eric looked up, but Cliffs expression was impassive, unmoved. So he hurried on. “‘For example, in a horror movie, consciously the person knows that reality is simply moving images projected on a screen. He knows that what he is seeing is not real, but his imagination quickly begins to accept it as real, and his central nervous system reacts as though it was reality. He starts to sweat, his heart races, he grips the edge of his chair. It becomes real to him.’”
Eric looked up, then rushed on. “Note this,” he said eagerly. “‘Your nervous system does not distinguish between a real and an imagined experience. What person has not awakened in the middle of the night with pounding heart or cold with fear? A dream is a totally fictional experience, but if the mind believes it is real, the body will react accordingly.’”
He stopped, pleased to see that he had now captured Cliffs attention and erased the skeptical look from his face. “Hasn’t that happened to you, where you had a dream trigger a pain response?”
When Cliff nodded slowly, Eric raced on.
“So have I! That has got to be a key. If somehow we could make your mind believe—just even for five minutes—that operating on me is not wrong. Then once mine was out, I could
do yours with no problem.”
Cliff was staring at the water, deep in concentration.
“But how? That’s where I’m stumped.”
Suddenly Cliff jerked up. “Hypnosis!” He nearly shouted it, then quickly looked around and lowered his voice to an excited whisper. “Hypnosis would have the same effect.”
“Hypnosis?”
“Yes, that’s it! Of course that’s it!” He grabbed Eric’s arm. “Listen. When people are placed under a hypnotic trance, they react in remarkable ways, do incredible things. It’s nothing mysterious or supernatural, it’s merely that the hypnotist is able to convince the person to believe differently about himself. He leads the subject to believe whatever the hypnotist says is true!”
Eric leaped to his feet. “Do you mean—”
But Cliff was too excited for interruptions. “I took a hypnosis class in medical school. We watched a dentist do a root canal without anesthesia. The patient was conscious the whole time and felt no pain or discomfort. Why? Because his mind believed there was no pain.”
“That’s it! That’s our answer. Can you teach me how to hypnotize you?”
For a long moment, Cliff was silent. Then finally he shook his head. “I don’t know. Somehow the whole subject left me a little nervous. I always felt we were toying with powers we didn’t fully understand, so I never used it in my practice. It’s been decades since I’ve tried to do it. But…” Again he was deep in thought. “We don’t need some deep and total trance, just enough to let me take your implantation out without feeling guilt.”
“Once mine is out, we’ll have to work fast, because our Guardian angels will know it immediately. But we can do it! I know we can!”
“Let’s walk.” Cliff stood and put his hand on Eric’s elbow. For several minutes they strolled quietly through the thinning crowds in the park while he challenged Eric with questions, and in turn he listened while Eric challenged his objections. Finally he fell silent, deep in thought.
“How soon?” he suddenly demanded.
“As soon as you can train me.”
“We’ll need three or four training sessions to be sure. Also, I’ve got to show you how to make the incision and stitch it up again.”
“That’s fine. I think it will take me about a week to get what I need to cut the wrist computers.”
“What?”
“A set of bolt cutters used by Navy frogmen in World War Two. There’s a set in the Museum of Remembrance that I can get to.”
There was another long silence. Then, “Are they still tracking your movements?”
“Yes. Twenty-four hours a day. But at least Clayne is no longer living with me. That gives me some breathing room.”
“How can you get the cutters without them knowing?”
“I can’t.”
Cliff’s head spun around, as Eric went on.
“Remember Sam Gillespie’s magic show that he always did for Halloween?”
“Yes.”
“Well, as a teenager I asked him one day how he did it. He would never tell me, but he finally said, ‘The art of the magician is to make the eye look where you want it to look.’ That’s what I plan to do. I’m carving a duplicate set of cutters to put back in the case. The tricky part will be getting the guards to look where I want them to while I make the change.”
“That’s no problem,” Cliff grumbled, “it’s the only tricky phase of the whole operation. Everything else is a piece of cake.”
“Agreed,” Eric said. “Can you get the necessary instruments and stuff?”
“Yes. No problem. Do you want some help?”
Eric looked up in surprise. “Help?”
Cliff nodded.
“Who?”
“Dr. Chester Abernathy. He is one of the surgeons on the implantation team with Dr. Gould. As a matter of fact, he assisted with your family.”
“And you want him?”
“I think he’ll come if we ask him. He absolutely loathes the whole system, and after doing this last batch of implantations from the village, he refused to do any more. Gould blackballed him out of surgery because of it, and he works in the emergency room now, stitching up minor cuts and dispensing aspirin.”
Eric’s face softened, but his expression was still dubious. “It would be taking a tremendous risk just to ask him.”
“I don’t think so. I’m ninety-nine percent sure of him. I’m not talking about doing it at the same time as we do you and me. But if we pull it off, we’d do him next. Once we’re free, we could use a drug on the others to avoid triggering their guilt responses. Sodium Pentothal would be perfect. Relieve their anxieties enough to perform the surgery.”
“How long after us would you do it? We’ll have to move fast to get to Mom and the girls. And would he come with us back to the valley?”
Cliff stopped and turned to face Eric. “I’ve been thinking a great deal about afterwards. I don’t think we ought to head for Serenity the minute we are free.”
“What?”
“I mean, I don’t think we ought to get your family and go back to the valley.”
Now it was Eric’s turn to stare. It was nearly full dark now, and they had moved just out of the circle of light from an overhead lamp post. Cliff’s eyes were hidden in the shadows, but Eric could see that his mouth was drawn into a hard line. “Eric,” he finally said, so softly that Eric stepped closer to hear him, “we can’t just walk away from all this. It isn’t enough for us to get free, or even to get your family free.”
“What do you mean, it isn’t enough. What isn’t enough?”
Cliff had never been much of a frivolous man or given to a great deal of levity, but Eric had never felt the depth of gravity that he sensed now, as Cliff reached out and gripped his arm.
“Eric, your father was a deeply religious man. He believed in God, and he tried to bring his life into conformance with that belief. As you know, when he began forming a group to survive the coming war, he selected men who were like him in that respect. They were good men, honest men, and for the most part, religious men like himself.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Many people wondered why he chose me.” He shook his head. “I wondered why he chose me.”
“But you’ve always gone to church, Cliff.”
“Once we were in the valley that was true, but before then I didn’t have much patience with organized religion. There was too much promise, too much rhetoric, too much running after the ways of the world trying to keep people happy, with little or no attention paid to true religion. I went to several churches when I was younger, but finally gave it up. But anyway, it surprised me that your father would choose me under those conditions.”
He released Eric’s arm, and dropped his hand to his side. “But I think I know now why he did.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he sensed that while I was not outwardly religious, I do feel deeply about good and evil.”
He shrugged, obviously embarrassed to be talking about himself so openly, then looked up at the stars for a long moment. “Ironically enough, though it would surprise some of my former associates to hear me say so, I believe in God. And I also believe in a devil. Oh, not in the sense of some horrible demon who peeks into windows to frighten little children, who wears a red suit and has a forked tail. No, I picture him to be much like us, only brilliant, cunning, enormously talented, and totally dedicated to evil. I guess I’m like C. S. Lewis in that regard. Maybe Satan is a fallen angel who now, knowing that he can never succeed in dethroning God, devotes every thought, turns every purpose to frustrating God’s will for us.”
Once again he stopped, peering into Eric’s face with intense earnestness. “So what has Satan and evil got to do with all this in Shalev? Normally we think of good men and bad men in classical, almost Hollywood terms. The good guys wear badges or calvary uniforms or Superman capes, while the bad guys are dark, with twisted faces, hiding a perpetual sneer behind a bandana or a gun.
“But let me tell you something I’ve learned from seventy years in this old life. Most of the truly evil men in the world do not wear masks or carry guns and knives or slink through the back alleys of the world. They wear custom-made business suits and fifty-dollar ties and meet around polished conference tables.”
“Like C. Major Denison?” Eric asked softly, beginning to understand.
“Precisely! And the fact that he has created much that is good and eliminated much that is bad in no way lessens the fact that he’s a deeply evil man. Even God, with all his incredibly majestic power and infinite knowledge, chooses not to force men to be good. And the reason is clear. When man has no choice but to do good, there’s no point in calling him moral. Men cannot be good without making that choice themselves. They can be made to act in good ways, but they cannot be good.”
He shook his head wearily. “The Major can spout on forever with his high-sounding motives, but this society is as evil as any that has ever stood upon the face of the earth. And we can’t just walk away and leave it intact, to prey upon others. We must try and bring it down.”
“And you really think we can do that, Cliff?”
“I don’t know. I think a lot of other people in this city are just like Chester Abernathy. Most have accepted what is because the alternative carries too much risk. But a lot of people would join us in a moment if we can show them we’ve beaten the system. We’ll have to pick them carefully at first—not only to protect ourselves, but to find those who can be of the greatest help to us.”
“But we’ve got to get my family free.”
“Your family is the family of man, and you can’t just abandon that larger family.”
“But what about Mother and Stephanie and—”
“They must be freed too, but—” Cliff’s hand came up and rubbed at his eyes. “But Eric, while they may be more important to you and me, in the greater perspective they are no more nor no less important than the seventy thousand slaves living around us.” He waved his hand. “Or the hundred and thirty thousand others living out their lives of programmed existence in the Alliance of Four Cities.”
Gerald N. Lund 4-In-1 Fiction eBook Bundle Page 37
